5 ms·

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scient

The semantic web standards are sorely lacking (for decades now) a killer application. Not in a theoretical universe of decentralized philosopher-computer-scientists but in the dumbed down, swipe-the-next-30sec-video, adtech oligopolized digital landscape of walled gardens. Providing better search metadata is hardly that killer app. Not in 2024. The lack of adoption has, imho, two components. 1. bad luck: the Web got worse, a lot worse. There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades. This was not pre-ordained. Bad stuff happens to societies when they don't pay attention. In a parallel universe where the good Web won, the semantic path would have been much more traveled and developed. 2. incompleteness of vision: if you dig to their nuclear core, semantic apps offer things like SPARQL queries and reasoners. Great, these functionalities are both unique and have definite utility but there is a reason (pun) that the excellent Protege project [1] is not the new spreadsheet. The calculus of cognitive cost versus tangible benefit to the average user is not favorable. One thing that is missing are abstractions that will help bridge that divide. Still, if we aspire to a better Web, the semantic web direction (if not current state) is our friend. The original visionaries of the semantic web where not out of their mind, they just did not account for the complex socio-economics of digital technology adoption. [1] https://protege.stanford.edu/ https://protege.stanford.edu/

austin-cheney 2y ago
A killer app is still not enough. People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility, so something like the semantic web would be super science that people will out of their way to intentionally ignore any profit upon so long as they can raise their laziness and class-action lawsuit liability.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I see RDF as a basis to build on. If I think RDF is pretty good but needs a way to keep track of provenance or temporality or something I can probably build something augmented that does that. If it really works for my company and it is a competitive advantage I would keep quiet about it and I know of more than one company that's done exactly that. The standards process is so exhausting and you have to fight with so many systems programmers who never wrote an application that it's just suicide to go down that road. BTW, RSS is an RDF application that nobody knows about https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec you can totally parse RSS feeds with a RDF-XML parser and do SPARQL and other things with them.
  - ttepasse 2y ago
    99% of the time you'll get an RSS 2.0 feed which is an XML format. Of course you can convert, but RSS 1.0 seems, like you said, forgotten from the world.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  >> People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility. Not only has this gotten much worse; even when you put in the stop gaps for developers such as linters or other plugins, they willfully ignore them and will actually implement code they know is determinantal to accessibility.
DrScientist 2y ago
I think the problem with any sort of ontology type approach is the problem isn't solved when you have defined the one ontology to rule them all after many years of wrangling between experts. As what you have done is spend many years generating a shared understanding of what that ontology means between the experts. Once that's done you have the much harder task for pushing that shared understanding to the rest of the world. ie the problem isn't defining a tag for a cat - it's having a global share vision of what a cat is. I mean we can't even agree on what is a man or a women.
- openrisk 2y ago
  You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one. By that argument we would never have a human language unless everybody spoke the same language. Turns out once you have well developed languages (and you do, because they are useful even when not universal) you can translate between them. Not perfectly, but generally good enough. Developing such linking tools between ontologies would be worthwhile if there are multiple ontologies covering the same domain, provided they are actually used (i.e., there are large datasets for each). Alas, instead of a bottom-up, organic approach people try to solve this with top-down, formal (upper-level) ontologies [1] and Leibnizian dreams of an underlying universality [2], which only adds to the cognitive load. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis
  - rapnie 2y ago
    > You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one In our spoken language the agents doing the parsing are human AI's (actual intelligences) able to deal with most of the finer nuances in semantics, and still making numerous errors in many contexts that lead to misunderstanding, i.e. parse errors. There was this hand-waving promise in semantic web movement of "if only we make everything machine-readable, then .." magic would happen. Undoubtedly unlocking numerous killer apps, if only we had these (increasingly complex) linked data standards and related tools to define and parse 'universal meaning'. An overreach, imho. Semantic web was always overpromising yet underdelivering. There may be new use cases in combinations of SM with ML/LLM but I don't think they'll be a vNext of the web anytime soon.
vasco 2y ago
> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.
- KolmogorovComp 2y ago
  Hardly a good reference, Internet Archive is older than Wikipedia.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old. I don't think anyone would parse "many decades" as "two decades". There's also OpenStreetMap, exactly two decades old and thus four years younger than Wikipedia.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      > Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old The world wide web (but not the internet) is only 3 decades old!
- Retr0id 2y ago
  Let's Encrypt is very good but it's not exactly a web app, semantic-web or otherwise.
- conzept 2y ago
  Not true: Wikidata, Open Alex, Europeana, ... and many smaller projects making use of all that data, such as my project Conzept (https://conze.pt https://conze.pt)
debarshri 2y ago
At TU delft, I was supposed to do my PhD in semantic web especially in the shipping logistics. It was funded by port of Rotterdam 10 years ago. Idea was to theorize and build various concepts around discrete data sharing, data discovery, classification, building ontology, query optimizations, automation and similar usecases. I decided not to pursue phd a month into it. I believe in semantic web. The biggest problem is that, due to lack of tooling and ease of use, it take alot of effort and time to see value in building something like that across various parties etc. You dont see the value right away.
- jsdwarf 2y ago
  Funny you bring up logistics and (data) ontologies. I'm a PM at a logistics software company and I'd say the lack of proper ontologies and standardized data exchange formats is the biggest effort driver for integrating 3rd party carrier/delivery services such as DHL, Fedex etc. It starts with the lack of a common terminology. For tool A a "booking" might be a reservation e.g. of a dock at a warehouse. For tool B the same word means a movement of goods between two accounts. In terms of data integration things have gotten A LOT worse since EDIFACT is de facto deprecated. Every carrier in the parcel business is cooking their own API, but with insufficient means. I've come across things like Polish endpoint names/error messages or country organisations of big Parcel couriers using different APIs. IMHO the EU has to step in here because integration costs skyrocket. They forced cellphone manufacturers to use USB-Cs for charging, why can't they force carriers to use a common API?
  - openrisk 2y ago
    The EU is doing its part in some domains. There is e.g., the eProcurement ontology [1] that aims to harmonize public procurement data flows. But I suppose it helped alot that (by EU law) everybody is obliged to submit to a central repository. [1] https://docs.ted.europa.eu/epo-home/index.html https://docs.ted.europa.eu/epo-home/index.html
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Good choice. The semantic web really brought me to the brink. The community has its head in the sands about... just about everything. Document databases and SQL are popular because all of the affordances around "records". That is, instead of deleting, inserting, and updating facts you get primitives that let you update records in a transaction even if you don't explicitly use transactions. It's very possible to define rules that will cut out a small piece of a graph that defines an individual "record" pertaining to some "subject" in the world even when blank nodes are in use. I've done it. You would go 3-4 years into your PhD and probably not find it in the literature, not get told about it by your prof, or your other grad students. (boy I went through the phase where I discovered most semantic web academics couldn't write hard SPARQL queries or do anything interesting with OWL) Meanwhile people who take a bootcamp can be productive with SQL in just a few days because SQL was developed long ago to give the run-of-the-mill developer superpowers. (imagine how lost people were trying to develop airline reservation systems in the 1960s!)
WolfOliver 2y ago
Graph Based RAG systems look promising https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-graph-rag/ https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-g...
jl6 2y ago
Killer applications solve real problems. What is the biggest real problem on the web today? The noise flood. Can semantic web standards help with that? Maybe! Something about trust, integrity, and lineage, perhaps.
- rakoo 2y ago
  Semantic Web doesn't help with the most basic thing: how do you get information ? If I want to know when was the Matrix shot, where do I go ? Today we have for-profit centralized point to get all information, because it's the only way this can be sustainable. Semantic Web might make it more feasible, by instead having lots of small interconnected agents that trust each other, much like... a Web of Trust. Except we know where the last experiment went (nowhere).
rakoo 2y ago
Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm. They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations towards the end of the text has turned out to be comically wrong, I'll let you read what it is) Your comment and the two above links point to the same conclusion: again and again, Worse is Better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
- domh 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing that Doctorow post, I had not seen that before. While the specific examples are of course dated (hello altavista and Napster), it still rings mostly true.
- openrisk 2y ago
  > An interesting read in itself... Indeed a good read, thanks for the link! > [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing). The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they are less true or even relevant. E.g., > People lie Yes. But public companies are increasingly reporting online their audited financials via standards like iXBRL and prescribed taxonomies. Increasingly they need to report environmental impact etc. I mentioned in another comment common EU public procurement ontologies. Think also the millions of education and medical institutions and their online content. In institutional context lies do happen, but at a slightly deeper level :-) > People are lazy This only raises the stakes. As somebody mentioned already, the cost of navigating random API's is high. The reason we still talk about the semantic web despite decades of no-show is precisely the persistent need to overcome this friction. > People are stupid We are who we are individually, but again this ignores the collective intelligence of groups. Besides the hordes of helpless individuals and a handful of "big techs"(=the random entities that figured out digital technology ahead of others) there is a vast universe of interests. They are not stupid but there is a learning curve. For the vast part of society the so-called digital transformation is only at its beginning.
cyanydeez 2y ago
i think you're confused. the killer app is everyone following the same format, and such, capitalists can extract all that information and sell LLMs that no one wants in place of more deterministic search and data products.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
Say what you want, but Macromedia Dreamweaver came pretty close to being "that killer app". Microsoft attempted the same with Frontpage, but abandoned it pretty quickly as they always do. I think that Web Browsers need to change what they are. They need to be able to understand content, correlate it, and distribute it. If a Browser sees itself not as a consuming app, but as a _contributing_ and _seeding_ app, it could influence the semantic web pretty quickly, and make it much more awesome. Beaker Browser came pretty close to that idea (but it was abandoned, too). Humans won't give a damn about hand-written semantic code, so you need to make the tools better that produce that code.
ricardo81 2y ago
There's another element, trusting the data. Often that may require some web scale data, like Pagerank but also any other authority/trust metric where you can say "this data is probably quality data". A rather basic example, published/last modified dates. It's well known in SEO circles at least in the recent past that changing them is useful to rank in Google, because Google prefers fresh content. Unless you're Google or have a less than trivial way of measuring page changes, the data may be less than trustworthy.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Not even Google seems to be making use of that capability, if they even have it in the first place. I'm regularly annoyed by results claiming to be from this year, only to find that it's a years-old article with fake metadata.
  - account42 2y ago
    Yeah, dates in Google results have become all but useless. It's just another meaningless knob for SEOtards to abuse.
  - ricardo81 2y ago
    They are quite good at near content duplicate detection so I imagine it's within their capabilities. Whether they care about recency, maybe not as long as the user metrics say the page is useful. Maybe a fallacy about content recency. You don't see many geocities style sites nowadays, even though there's many older sites with quality (and original) content. Maybe mobile friendliness plays into that though.
echelon 2y ago
Search and ontologies weren't the only goals. Microformats enabled standardized data markup that lots of applications could consume and understand. RSS and Atom were semantic web formats. They had a ton of applications built to publish and consume them, and people found the formats incredibly useful. The idea was that if you ran into ingestible semantic content, your browser, a plugin, or another application could use that data in a specialized way. It worked because it was a standardized and portable data layer as opposed to a soup of meaningless HTML tags. There were ideas for a distributed P2P social network built on the semantic web, standardized ways to write articles and blog posts, and much more. If that had caught on, we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble continually reinventing the wheel. And perhaps we would be in a world without walled gardens.
recursivedoubts 2y ago
The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well. Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wasted on non-intentional beings like software (that I'm aware of): https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h... Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. It just hasn't worked out the way that people expected, and that's OK.
- dboreham 2y ago
  I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.
  - recursivedoubts 2y ago
    man
  - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    How are you oblivious of the performative contradiction that is that statement? Please tell me you're not an eliminativist. There is nothing respectable about eliminativism. Self-refuting, and Procrustean in its methodology, denying observation it cannot explain or reconcile. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. It is obstinate ideology.
    - Pet_Ant 2y ago
      TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism > Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
jancsika 2y ago
> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades. Off the top of head... OpenStreetMap was in 2004. Mastodon and the associated spec-thingy was around 2016. One/two decades is not the same as many decades. Oh, and what about asm.js? Sure, archive.org is many decades old. But suddenly I'm using it to play every retro game under the sun on my browser. And we can try out a lot of FOSS software in the browser without installing things. Didn't someone post a blog to explain X11 where the examples were running a javascript implementation of the X window system? Seems to me the entire web-o-sphere leveled up over the past decade. I mean, it's so good in fact that I can run an LLM clientside in the browser. (Granted, it's probably trained in part on your public musing that the web is worse.) And all this while still rendering Berkshire Hathaway website correctly for many decades. How many times would the Gnome devs have broken it by now? How many upgrades would Apple have forced an "iweb" upgrade in that time? Edit: typo
- openrisk 2y ago
  The web browser (or an app with a vague likeness to a browser) would indeed be in the epicenter of a "semantic" leap if that happens. The technical capability of the browser to be an OS within an OS is more than proven by now, but not sure I am impressed with the utility thus far. At the same time even basic features in the "right direction", empowering the users information processing ability (bookmarks, rss, etc) have stagnated or regressed.
glenstein 2y ago
I am not sure I understand the fixation on a "killer app" in the context of web standards. We are talking about things like, say, XML, or SVG or HTTP/2. They can have their rationale and their value simply by serving to enable organic growth of a web ecosystem. I think I agree most with your last sentence and should define success more in those terms, aspiring to a better web.
- openrisk 2y ago
  The idea (or hope) is that apps based on semantic standards would kick off a virtuous cycle where publishers of information keep investing in both generating metadata and evolving the standards themselves. As many have mentioned in the thread, thats not a trivial step. People sort of try. A concrete example are the Activitypub/Fediverse standards which dared to use json-ld. To my knowledge so far the social media experience of mastodon and friends is not qualitatively different from the old web stuff.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    I think you misunderstand me, it's not that I don't understand the idea in and of itself, I don't understand the logic of believing that such a thing is integral to the definition of success of protocols.
EGreg 2y ago
Why do we need web standards for the semantic web anymore when we have LLMs? Just make LLMs more ubiquitous and train them on the Web. Rather than crawling or something. The LLMs are a lot more resilient.
brimwats 2y ago
I think pointing just to Wikipedia ignores the growing use adoption and massive impact of Wikidata. perhaps I'm biased because of my field but everything I see indicates the growing and not shrinking power of it, I would categorize it as different than Wikipedia's effects though.

austin-cheney 2y ago

A killer app is still not enough. People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility, so something like the semantic web would be super science that people will out of their way to intentionally ignore any profit upon so long as they can raise their laziness and class-action lawsuit liability.

PaulHoule 2y ago
I see RDF as a basis to build on. If I think RDF is pretty good but needs a way to keep track of provenance or temporality or something I can probably build something augmented that does that. If it really works for my company and it is a competitive advantage I would keep quiet about it and I know of more than one company that's done exactly that. The standards process is so exhausting and you have to fight with so many systems programmers who never wrote an application that it's just suicide to go down that road. BTW, RSS is an RDF application that nobody knows about https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec you can totally parse RSS feeds with a RDF-XML parser and do SPARQL and other things with them.
- ttepasse 2y ago
  99% of the time you'll get an RSS 2.0 feed which is an XML format. Of course you can convert, but RSS 1.0 seems, like you said, forgotten from the world.
burningChrome 2y ago
>> People can’t get HTML right for basic accessibility. Not only has this gotten much worse; even when you put in the stop gaps for developers such as linters or other plugins, they willfully ignore them and will actually implement code they know is determinantal to accessibility.

DrScientist 2y ago

I think the problem with any sort of ontology type approach is the problem isn't solved when you have defined the one ontology to rule them all after many years of wrangling between experts. As what you have done is spend many years generating a shared understanding of what that ontology means between the experts. Once that's done you have the much harder task for pushing that shared understanding to the rest of the world. ie the problem isn't defining a tag for a cat - it's having a global share vision of what a cat is. I mean we can't even agree on what is a man or a women.

openrisk 2y ago
You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one. By that argument we would never have a human language unless everybody spoke the same language. Turns out once you have well developed languages (and you do, because they are useful even when not universal) you can translate between them. Not perfectly, but generally good enough. Developing such linking tools between ontologies would be worthwhile if there are multiple ontologies covering the same domain, provided they are actually used (i.e., there are large datasets for each). Alas, instead of a bottom-up, organic approach people try to solve this with top-down, formal (upper-level) ontologies [1] and Leibnizian dreams of an underlying universality [2], which only adds to the cognitive load. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis
- rapnie 2y ago
  > You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one In our spoken language the agents doing the parsing are human AI's (actual intelligences) able to deal with most of the finer nuances in semantics, and still making numerous errors in many contexts that lead to misunderstanding, i.e. parse errors. There was this hand-waving promise in semantic web movement of "if only we make everything machine-readable, then .." magic would happen. Undoubtedly unlocking numerous killer apps, if only we had these (increasingly complex) linked data standards and related tools to define and parse 'universal meaning'. An overreach, imho. Semantic web was always overpromising yet underdelivering. There may be new use cases in combinations of SM with ML/LLM but I don't think they'll be a vNext of the web anytime soon.

vasco 2y ago

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades I'll give you two examples: Internet Archive. Let's Encrypt.

KolmogorovComp 2y ago
Hardly a good reference, Internet Archive is older than Wikipedia.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old. I don't think anyone would parse "many decades" as "two decades". There's also OpenStreetMap, exactly two decades old and thus four years younger than Wikipedia.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    > Wikipedia itself is only a little over two decades old The world wide web (but not the internet) is only 3 decades old!
Retr0id 2y ago
Let's Encrypt is very good but it's not exactly a web app, semantic-web or otherwise.
conzept 2y ago
Not true: Wikidata, Open Alex, Europeana, ... and many smaller projects making use of all that data, such as my project Conzept (https://conze.pt https://conze.pt)

debarshri 2y ago

At TU delft, I was supposed to do my PhD in semantic web especially in the shipping logistics. It was funded by port of Rotterdam 10 years ago. Idea was to theorize and build various concepts around discrete data sharing, data discovery, classification, building ontology, query optimizations, automation and similar usecases. I decided not to pursue phd a month into it. I believe in semantic web. The biggest problem is that, due to lack of tooling and ease of use, it take alot of effort and time to see value in building something like that across various parties etc. You dont see the value right away.

jsdwarf 2y ago
Funny you bring up logistics and (data) ontologies. I'm a PM at a logistics software company and I'd say the lack of proper ontologies and standardized data exchange formats is the biggest effort driver for integrating 3rd party carrier/delivery services such as DHL, Fedex etc. It starts with the lack of a common terminology. For tool A a "booking" might be a reservation e.g. of a dock at a warehouse. For tool B the same word means a movement of goods between two accounts. In terms of data integration things have gotten A LOT worse since EDIFACT is de facto deprecated. Every carrier in the parcel business is cooking their own API, but with insufficient means. I've come across things like Polish endpoint names/error messages or country organisations of big Parcel couriers using different APIs. IMHO the EU has to step in here because integration costs skyrocket. They forced cellphone manufacturers to use USB-Cs for charging, why can't they force carriers to use a common API?
- openrisk 2y ago
  The EU is doing its part in some domains. There is e.g., the eProcurement ontology [1] that aims to harmonize public procurement data flows. But I suppose it helped alot that (by EU law) everybody is obliged to submit to a central repository. [1] https://docs.ted.europa.eu/epo-home/index.html https://docs.ted.europa.eu/epo-home/index.html
PaulHoule 2y ago
Good choice. The semantic web really brought me to the brink. The community has its head in the sands about... just about everything. Document databases and SQL are popular because all of the affordances around "records". That is, instead of deleting, inserting, and updating facts you get primitives that let you update records in a transaction even if you don't explicitly use transactions. It's very possible to define rules that will cut out a small piece of a graph that defines an individual "record" pertaining to some "subject" in the world even when blank nodes are in use. I've done it. You would go 3-4 years into your PhD and probably not find it in the literature, not get told about it by your prof, or your other grad students. (boy I went through the phase where I discovered most semantic web academics couldn't write hard SPARQL queries or do anything interesting with OWL) Meanwhile people who take a bootcamp can be productive with SQL in just a few days because SQL was developed long ago to give the run-of-the-mill developer superpowers. (imagine how lost people were trying to develop airline reservation systems in the 1960s!)

WolfOliver 2y ago

Graph Based RAG systems look promising https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-graph-rag/ https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-g...

jl6 2y ago

Killer applications solve real problems. What is the biggest real problem on the web today? The noise flood. Can semantic web standards help with that? Maybe! Something about trust, integrity, and lineage, perhaps.

rakoo 2y ago
Semantic Web doesn't help with the most basic thing: how do you get information ? If I want to know when was the Matrix shot, where do I go ? Today we have for-profit centralized point to get all information, because it's the only way this can be sustainable. Semantic Web might make it more feasible, by instead having lots of small interconnected agents that trust each other, much like... a Web of Trust. Except we know where the last experiment went (nowhere).

rakoo 2y ago

Over on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm. They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations towards the end of the text has turned out to be comically wrong, I'll let you read what it is) Your comment and the two above links point to the same conclusion: again and again, Worse is Better (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

domh 2y ago
Thanks for sharing that Doctorow post, I had not seen that before. While the specific examples are of course dated (hello altavista and Napster), it still rings mostly true.
openrisk 2y ago
> An interesting read in itself... Indeed a good read, thanks for the link! > [Cory Doctorow's] seven insurmountable obstacles I think his context is the narrower "Web of individuals" where many of his seven challenges are real (and ongoing). The elephant in the digital room is the "Web of organizations", whether that is companies, the public sector, civil society etc. If you revisit his objections in that light they are less true or even relevant. E.g., > People lie Yes. But public companies are increasingly reporting online their audited financials via standards like iXBRL and prescribed taxonomies. Increasingly they need to report environmental impact etc. I mentioned in another comment common EU public procurement ontologies. Think also the millions of education and medical institutions and their online content. In institutional context lies do happen, but at a slightly deeper level :-) > People are lazy This only raises the stakes. As somebody mentioned already, the cost of navigating random API's is high. The reason we still talk about the semantic web despite decades of no-show is precisely the persistent need to overcome this friction. > People are stupid We are who we are individually, but again this ignores the collective intelligence of groups. Besides the hordes of helpless individuals and a handful of "big techs"(=the random entities that figured out digital technology ahead of others) there is a vast universe of interests. They are not stupid but there is a learning curve. For the vast part of society the so-called digital transformation is only at its beginning.

cyanydeez 2y ago

i think you're confused. the killer app is everyone following the same format, and such, capitalists can extract all that information and sell LLMs that no one wants in place of more deterministic search and data products.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago

Say what you want, but Macromedia Dreamweaver came pretty close to being "that killer app". Microsoft attempted the same with Frontpage, but abandoned it pretty quickly as they always do. I think that Web Browsers need to change what they are. They need to be able to understand content, correlate it, and distribute it. If a Browser sees itself not as a consuming app, but as a _contributing_ and _seeding_ app, it could influence the semantic web pretty quickly, and make it much more awesome. Beaker Browser came pretty close to that idea (but it was abandoned, too). Humans won't give a damn about hand-written semantic code, so you need to make the tools better that produce that code.

ricardo81 2y ago

There's another element, trusting the data. Often that may require some web scale data, like Pagerank but also any other authority/trust metric where you can say "this data is probably quality data". A rather basic example, published/last modified dates. It's well known in SEO circles at least in the recent past that changing them is useful to rank in Google, because Google prefers fresh content. Unless you're Google or have a less than trivial way of measuring page changes, the data may be less than trustworthy.

lxgr 2y ago
Not even Google seems to be making use of that capability, if they even have it in the first place. I'm regularly annoyed by results claiming to be from this year, only to find that it's a years-old article with fake metadata.
- account42 2y ago
  Yeah, dates in Google results have become all but useless. It's just another meaningless knob for SEOtards to abuse.
- ricardo81 2y ago
  They are quite good at near content duplicate detection so I imagine it's within their capabilities. Whether they care about recency, maybe not as long as the user metrics say the page is useful. Maybe a fallacy about content recency. You don't see many geocities style sites nowadays, even though there's many older sites with quality (and original) content. Maybe mobile friendliness plays into that though.

echelon 2y ago

Search and ontologies weren't the only goals. Microformats enabled standardized data markup that lots of applications could consume and understand. RSS and Atom were semantic web formats. They had a ton of applications built to publish and consume them, and people found the formats incredibly useful. The idea was that if you ran into ingestible semantic content, your browser, a plugin, or another application could use that data in a specialized way. It worked because it was a standardized and portable data layer as opposed to a soup of meaningless HTML tags. There were ideas for a distributed P2P social network built on the semantic web, standardized ways to write articles and blog posts, and much more. If that had caught on, we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble continually reinventing the wheel. And perhaps we would be in a world without walled gardens.

recursivedoubts 2y ago

The semantic web has been, in my opinion, a category error. Semantics means meaning and computers/automated systems don't really do meaning very well and certainly don't do intention very well. Mapping the incredible success of The Web onto automated systems hasn't worked because the defining and unique characteristic of The Web is REST and, in particular, the uniform interface of REST. This uniform interface is wasted on non-intentional beings like software (that I'm aware of): https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.html https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h... Maybe this all changes when AI takes over, but AI seems to do fine without us defining ontologies, etc. It just hasn't worked out the way that people expected, and that's OK.

dboreham 2y ago
I take the other side of this trade, and have since c. 1980. I say that semantics is a delusion our brains creates. Doesn't really exist. Or conversely is not the magical thing we think it is.
- recursivedoubts 2y ago
  man
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  How are you oblivious of the performative contradiction that is that statement? Please tell me you're not an eliminativist. There is nothing respectable about eliminativism. Self-refuting, and Procrustean in its methodology, denying observation it cannot explain or reconcile. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist refuses or is unable to revise his worldview despite the crushing weight of contradiction and incoherence. It is obstinate ideology.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism > Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.

jancsika 2y ago

> There hasn't been a Wikipedia-like event for many decades. Off the top of head... OpenStreetMap was in 2004. Mastodon and the associated spec-thingy was around 2016. One/two decades is not the same as many decades. Oh, and what about asm.js? Sure, archive.org is many decades old. But suddenly I'm using it to play every retro game under the sun on my browser. And we can try out a lot of FOSS software in the browser without installing things. Didn't someone post a blog to explain X11 where the examples were running a javascript implementation of the X window system? Seems to me the entire web-o-sphere leveled up over the past decade. I mean, it's so good in fact that I can run an LLM clientside in the browser. (Granted, it's probably trained in part on your public musing that the web is worse.) And all this while still rendering Berkshire Hathaway website correctly for many decades. How many times would the Gnome devs have broken it by now? How many upgrades would Apple have forced an "iweb" upgrade in that time? Edit: typo

openrisk 2y ago
The web browser (or an app with a vague likeness to a browser) would indeed be in the epicenter of a "semantic" leap if that happens. The technical capability of the browser to be an OS within an OS is more than proven by now, but not sure I am impressed with the utility thus far. At the same time even basic features in the "right direction", empowering the users information processing ability (bookmarks, rss, etc) have stagnated or regressed.

glenstein 2y ago

I am not sure I understand the fixation on a "killer app" in the context of web standards. We are talking about things like, say, XML, or SVG or HTTP/2. They can have their rationale and their value simply by serving to enable organic growth of a web ecosystem. I think I agree most with your last sentence and should define success more in those terms, aspiring to a better web.

openrisk 2y ago
The idea (or hope) is that apps based on semantic standards would kick off a virtuous cycle where publishers of information keep investing in both generating metadata and evolving the standards themselves. As many have mentioned in the thread, thats not a trivial step. People sort of try. A concrete example are the Activitypub/Fediverse standards which dared to use json-ld. To my knowledge so far the social media experience of mastodon and friends is not qualitatively different from the old web stuff.
- glenstein 2y ago
  I think you misunderstand me, it's not that I don't understand the idea in and of itself, I don't understand the logic of believing that such a thing is integral to the definition of success of protocols.

EGreg 2y ago

Why do we need web standards for the semantic web anymore when we have LLMs? Just make LLMs more ubiquitous and train them on the Web. Rather than crawling or something. The LLMs are a lot more resilient.

brimwats 2y ago

I think pointing just to Wikipedia ignores the growing use adoption and massive impact of Wikidata. perhaps I'm biased because of my field but everything I see indicates the growing and not shrinking power of it, I would categorize it as different than Wikipedia's effects though.